O weak faith,
what do you call
this, then––?
crowding the air
with those eyes?
See
Beyond sight
Month: June 2024
Shoreline Notes
On nearness
I kept meaning to see it, and the intention throbbed like impending heartbreak. To chronicle the residents, for example, of a hot afternoon lakeshore: the stained-glass wings of dragonfly in cattail, then open space, beach-like; blankets, sunbathers. Where a child laughs, running, and the rooftops beyond the green with gulls above these and the trees and how peace is the word of the day, so peaceful, the sunbathers say. You cannot see the killings from here. Or how somewhere an old soul is returning and a new one, not yet known in this place, is being born, formed like a new star from the compression of elements over time. And of compassion, that ache of the imagination. And the nearness of death and our proximities to one another in the face of an unnamed annihilation, and of this we know nothing so go on remembering––to a point. These layers of time assembled and striated on our shelves, against nature which prefers the susurrations of breath and heartbeat, waves––those notes that only come in wholes. Now the ritual. Bread, wine, hands. Forgive me sister, stranger, friend. Forgive me, child, for I know not what I am beyond that glass. So I stare into it in this silence, trying to sing.
Cloudfaces
Metamorphoses
It may have been that fearful hope, moved by agony, that caused a slippage of the faces we had taken for protection, flimsy as they were. Then we became something cloudlike, breathing, and the sound of us was music. The music of us was made of what we had known in the time before we knew faces. We could hear much when we were nothing and no one.
In Magnetic Fields
Movements of a charged particle.
What strange gravity is this, which won’t be understood by common measurements––of time, or distance, mass or reason––against which I have been trained to measure and describe what I am? Against (or within) this, I am a particle at a level beneath the body, beneath even what I took to be the building blocks of any body, and I am charged before I am, without an after, circling in exchange with other bodies, perpendicular to the threads of a vast web I cannot see, and I do not know myself.
Wayward One
Willing to approach
Even this pot-bellied prayer, who staggers to the altar half-drunk with delusion, and the other half hungover with optimistic excess, leaning now into despair, even in blindness, in these neglected robes, stinking and torn in all the wrong places, with potatoes growing where hearing might breathe, who can’t carry a tune to save a life, who can’t even start by saving the one they have, who will forget this morning’s penitence at the next chance to scheme some way ahead––even this one here is greeted with the warmth of a loving parent just now seeing a beloved child for the first time after so long away that anyone with any sense would have declared them lost, a hopeless case, too far gone.
Ogre
And the watch
But who guards that language, nourished by fairy tales and fastened to swinging vines of the monster’s rough hair, enough to clear the hungry bog when the timing and the wind is right––and who only barely makes the crossing, for now?
Stone Unturned
The weight of being
. . . Okay, but here is a warning. I am no machine, so you will not make me faster or more efficient by dismantling my parts and addressing them one at a time. I will not be fixed. Repair, on the other hand, is a process I welcome. Now I am seas against shores and now I am a single battered rock and next thing you know I will be washed up, waiting, smooth and gleaming at a shore, unnoticed tide after tide until one day there is someone walking low to the ground on uncertain feet to find the wonder of the moment, the smooth weight of so much wear, round and solid in her toddler’s hand.
Moth
Among leaves
These new ones, just arrived, kept coming to be washed. We tried. To know that river, hear her birds, those faithful attendants hidden behind the leaves of endless pages, the pulse of bees beyond the labyrinth of things that destroy in the name of saving. We try again.
Limbic Linguistics
The architecture of beginnings
There is a dream of finding home inside a single, endless sentence––not one to be realized except intermittently, in fleeting sightings of the wonder it might become––not protection, but enactment of a dance in time with the chorus of the living, whose expansive breath would naturally include the dead, breathing into these and into me, too, and we would be where there is no there, only here, and we, laughing. Breaking open. Our faces to find behind them. A grammar that cannot be verified, made of a logic we may approach but never encode, only and ever––
In the Grasses
In the deep
Do I live? The question a reaction to certain ideas of the empire, on really living, as the saying goes. As promoted by the feathered peacocks, the shining kings, the swaggering killers. To whom the fieldmouse is prey or pest, and the whale is a mythical metaphor, a catalyst for the next heroic quest. But these sisters listen low to the ground, tending the dens where the babies wait, and swim beyond the senses of the sonars. Here are lessons in the art of going missing for entire seasons, keeping the camouflage close, and the beloveds closer, in the shadows of the seizing empire, feeding the budding bodies of the dens and depths beyond detection.
Life is something separate from announcements. And yet, what else are these words penned in the quiet (for now, it is early) room with the sleeping cat and the waking birds outside, in the moments before its time to give it all over to the tending of the mouths that come and go, the littles and the broken, the invisibles. Sometimes they are unsure if they live or will keep living. Sometimes I want to announce for them, into each: Live, live, live! These eyes get weary sometimes of the announcing I.
And yet, we live.